Written by: Ma He, Foresight News
On October 19, Pump.fun announced that PreStocks has officially launched on the platform. Users can now directly trade Pre-IPO tokens corresponding to eight companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Neuralink, Figure AI, Kalshi, Polymarket, and Oura—on Pump.fun.
After the announcement, the PUMP token did not show significant volatility and is currently still fluctuating around $0.0044.
Against the backdrop of the Pre-IPO boom, why did Pump.fun choose to partner with PreStocks to enter the Pre-IPO track together? Are the stock tokens bought on PreStocks real stocks?
Providing Only Price Exposure, Not True Equity
PreStocks is a Pre-IPO tokenization platform running on Solana. The platform captures underlying unlisted equity through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) in the primary and secondary markets, and mints SPL synthetic assets mapping the corresponding economic exposure based on the Solana Token-2022 standard.
According to its official website, these tokens only provide economic exposure, do not represent true equity, do not grant holders voting rights, dividend rights, information rights, or any other legal rights, and have not been recognized, authorized, or endorsed by the corresponding companies. The platform explicitly states that it is unavailable to U.S. persons, that there is no minimum amount required for trading, and that users can buy and sell on DEXs such as Jupiter through a Solana wallet.
PreStocks was formerly prePO, founded by Xavier Ekkel in 2021. Ekkel previously worked as a software engineer at Canva. prePO operated on other chains in its early days and completed multiple funding rounds, with investors including Republic Capital and other institutions.
In August 2025, the project officially changed its name to PreStocks and migrated to Solana, beginning to issue tokens for specific private companies.
Based on public data, PreStocks' current scale remains relatively limited.
As of October 20, data on PreStocks' official website shows that its AUM (assets under management) is only $22.37 million.
The latest data shows that the trading volume of OpenAI's tokenized assets over the past 24 hours was $6.47 million, while the trading volume of Anthropic's tokenized assets over the past 24 hours was only $2.92 million. Apart from leading targets such as OpenAI and Anthropic that have a certain depth of funds, the remaining long-tail assets generally face the dilemma of insufficient liquidity and high slippage. Their prices are mainly affected by on-chain supply and demand and market sentiment, lacking an anchor price from public markets.
It is worth emphasizing that the core mechanism of this launch is not only to support direct buying and selling of these 8 major Pre-IPO assets, but also to allow users to use these pre-market tokens as underlying pricing/liquidity pairing assets to launch new Meme coins—for example, launching a Meme that forms a pool with the OpenAI token.
Pump.fun Gains Another Layer of Revenue
For Pump.fun, this integration has a clear commercial logic. As the largest memecoin launch platform on Solana, Pump.fun's revenue mainly comes from fees when users launch tokens and from transaction fees generated by subsequent trading. The core problem the platform faces is that narratives are consumed very quickly, and it needs to continuously introduce new themes with built-in attention to maintain launch volume and trading activity.
Pre-IPO-related companies themselves have continued to be at the center of market discussion for some time. Names such as OpenAI and Anthropic frequently appear in financing, valuation, and industry developments. Bringing high-attention unicorn pre-market assets into PumpSwap as underlying pricing and liquidity pairing assets essentially injects entirely new structured narrative fuel into the platform. Users can launch new coins around these names, and related trading will increase accordingly, thereby bringing additional fee revenue to the platform.
According to Pump.fun data, although its DEX fee revenue has recovered somewhat, it still has a certain gap from its 2025 peak.
If it can seize the upward wave in the subsequent Pre-IPO boom, this will undoubtedly have a positive impact on its own DEX trading volume and PUMP token buybacks.
Currently, the official team has repurchased and burned 489.74 million PUMP, accounting for 12.276% of the total supply.
For PreStocks, this is an additional distribution and trading entry point. Even if derivative Meme coins incubated based on Pre-IPO asset pairings cannot escape the fate of high elimination rates and short life cycles, as long as some trading occurs on Pump.fun, both parties can benefit from fees.
However, the prices of PreStocks tokens are entirely determined by on-chain liquidity and participants' trading behavior, and volatility may be significant.
Some of the companies whose assets have been listed have previously expressed restrictive attitudes toward holding their shares through SPVs, which further increases the uncertainty of such tokens.
In mid-May 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI almost simultaneously updated their equity transfer policies, explicitly stating that share transfers without written approval from the board of directors are invalid and will not be recognized by the companies. The two companies specifically named methods including through special purpose vehicles (SPVs), tokenization instruments, and contracts.
Anthropic stated in its announcement: "We do not permit special purpose vehicles to acquire Anthropic shares, and any transfer of shares to an SPV is invalid under our transfer restrictions." OpenAI also issued a similar warning, stating that unapproved transactions may be invalid and may have no economic value to the buyer.
This statement dealt a direct blow to the related tokens issued by PreStocks on Solana. According to CoinMarketCap data, the price of Anthropic on PreStocks fell from around $1,400 to $842 after the warning was issued, a single-day drop of over 26%, while OpenAI dropped from $1,984 all the way down to around $890, a decline of about 46%.
Prices plunging merely because of an official statement clearly shows that some investors have great doubts about its "true legitimacy."
At present, some investors and traders, due to factors such as liquidity, are also turning their attention to other platforms. Hyperliquid and Lighter allow users to leverage long or short positions on private company valuations through synthetic perpetual contracts, without needing to hold any underlying equity through an SPV.
Such products rely entirely on price oracles and margin mechanisms, with low trading thresholds and high leverage, but they also face forced liquidation risks, and after companies explicitly restricted equity transfers, some related markets have also seen closures or shrinking liquidity.
For PreStocks, this is a new distribution channel; for Pump.fun, it is about turning the currently popular Pre-IPO narrative into a paired asset that can generate fees. As for whether these newly launched meme coins can truly bring sustained trading volume, it still depends on the market's acceptance of this kind of "price exposure."
